Harry Mathews Books In Order

Novels

The Conversions (1962)
Tlooth (1966)
The Sinking of the Odradek Stadium (1975)
Cigarettes (1987)
The Journalist (1994)
My Life In Cia (2005)
The Solitary Twin (2018)

Collections

Country Cooking (1980)
Singular Pleasures (1988)
The Human Country (2002)

Non fiction

Selected Declarations of Dependence (1978)
The Orchard (1989)
The Way Home (1989)
20 Lines a Day (1989)
Immeasurable Distances (1991)
The Case of the Persevering Maltese (2003)

Novels Book Covers

Collections Book Covers

Non fiction Book Covers

Harry Mathews Books Overview

The Conversions

A wild goose chase through a remarkably unusual world, The Conversions invites both reader and protagonist to participate in a quest for answers to an elusive game.

This novel begins in a Russian prison camp at a baseball game featuring the defective Baptists versus the Fideists. There is a plot of sorts, one of revenge surrounding a doctor who, in removing a bone spur from our narrator, manages to amputate a ring and index finger, a significant surgical error considering that the narrator is, or was, a violinist. When Dr. Roak is released from prison, our narrator escapes in order to begin the pursuit, and thus begins a digressive journey from Afghanistan to Venice, then on to India and Morocco and France. All of this takes place amid Mathews’s fictional concern and play with games, puzzles, arcana, and stories within stories.

The Sinking of the Odradek Stadium

The Sinking of Odradek Stadium is a brilliant comedy composed of an exchange of letters between a husband living in the Miami of the not too distant future and his wife living in an Italy of the not too remote past. He is Zachary McCaltex, an overweight, emotional intellectual or in any event a librarian. She is the charming Twang Panattapam, a woman discovered by Zachary in PanNam, a Southeast Asian country that was once an Italian Colony. Together they are trying to make their fortune by tracing the whereabouts of a treasure supposedly lost off the coast of Florida in the sixteenth century. Once the epistolary convention is accepted, the novel unfolds with demonic logic. The two protagonists infect each other with enthusiasm and doubt, until a lost letter subverts their exchange. The native Twang gains confidence and independence, while Zachary little by little goes to pieces.

Cigarettes

Fiction. Available again, along with TLOOTH, as part of Dalkey Archive’s American Literature Series, Cigarettes has been called ‘A brilliant and unsettling book…
‘ Tom Clark, Los Angeles Times Book Review. It is a novel about the rich and powerful, tracing their complicated relationships from the 1930s to the 1960s, from New York City to Upper New York State. ‘Cigarettes has the delicate yet rigorous architecture of latticework: if we concentrate on the light streaming through its apertures we are still attentive to its carpentry; if we focus on its geometry the light is, of needs, a constant presence. It is a triumph of the imagination’ Gilbert Sorrentino.

The Journalist

As an aid to recovering from a nervous breakdown, the narrator of The Journalist begins to keep daily records of almost everything that goes on in his life, from how much he has spent on books and movies to what he eats. As the diary progresses, the narrator’s entries become more and more detailed and increasingly bizarre, especially as he begins to devise elaborate classification systems for his unwieldy materials. Since these entries require more and more of his time, he begins to withdraw from family and friends, entering a world perfectly ordered, organized, and utterly weird.

My Life In Cia

‘It’s outrageous that an educated man and a gifted writer like Mr. Mathews could make such a public confession of such shameful activities.’ Q. Kuhlmann, author of The Eye of Anguish: Subversive Activity in the German Democratic RepublicThrough a series of improbable coincidences, in the early 1970s Harry Mathews, then living in France, was commonly reputed to be a CIA agent. Even his closest friends had their suspicions, which were only reinforced each time he tried to deny such a connection. With growing frustration at his inability to make anyone believe him, Mathews decided to act the part. My Life In Cia documents Mathews’s experiences as a would be spy during 1973, where amid charged world events the coup in Chile, Watergate, the ending of the Vietnam War he found himself engaged in a game that took sinister twists as various foreign agencies were interested in him for their own dubious purposes. Harry Mathews has turned these strange events into a spellbinding thriller that relentlessly blurs the line between fact and fiction.

Singular Pleasures

The first paperback edition of Singular Pleasures, sixty one vignettes on the sole subject of masturbation, records the imaginative varieties of this activity in prose that is playful, intimate, quirky and humane. The soloists range in age from nine to eighty; the locales from Australia to Zaire; the means of masturbation from the commonplace to the bizarre. The young man in Gaza with his hair dryers, the woman in Manilla with her cello bow, the long eared bat, the charioteer, the candelabra this swirl of unlikely individuals and objects is brought together in such a way that it floods a world born fresh once more. Illustrated throughout with watercolors by Francesco Clemente that offer an intriguing counterpoint to Mathewss fictions. The illustrator has also collaborated with such writers as Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, and John Wieners.

The Human Country

Available For The First Time In One Volume, The Very Best Of Mathews’s Short Fiction; This expertly designed original paperback presents a comprehensive collection of internationally renowned poet and novelist Harry Mathews’ short prose. From the hilarious ‘The Broadcast,’ in which the narrator learns from a radio program that everything he needs in life should fit into one sock, to ‘Calibration of Latitude,’ which follows Sir Joseph Pernican on a meandering and seemingly aimless but deeply moving journey, this is a long awaited addition to Mathew’s beloved and masterful canon.

The Way Home

This selection of Harry Mathews’s longer prose writings attests his innovative genius in sevenradically differing works: Country Cooking in Central France is perhaps the longest, most demanding and surely the most extravagant recipe ever concocted. Mathews s best piece The Guardian. Singular Pleasures: 61 pungent demonstrations of masturbation by both sexes, from Almaty to Zizanga. The Orchard is the author s memorial of his close friend Georges Perec, composed in startlingly succinct and revealing glimpses. Armenian Papers, a sequence of prose poems that recounts a glittering epic of servitude, love and war in a land remote both in time and place. Translation and the Oulipo: the Case of Preserving Maltese, an essay that establishes with persuasive guile a context for the practices of the Oulipo or, Ouvroir de litt rature potentielle Workshop for potential literature, the provocative group of writers and mathematicians of which Mathews is the only active English speaking member. The Way Home, a story derived from a series of drawings by Trevor Winkfield incorporated here in the text that! explores the dreamlike life within an ordinary man s ordinary day. Autobiography, an exceptional example of the genre in which the author tells his own story entirely in terms of the people who have marked his life. This is a revised edition of a collection first published in the UK in 1988 and not previously available in the USA. The London Times described the original collection as an almost pugnacious demonstration of his talents.

20 Lines a Day

diaristic ‘20 Lines a Day, genius or not’

The Case of the Persevering Maltese

A companion to THE HUMAN COUNTRY: NEW AND COLLECTED STORIES, this volume contains all of Harry Mathews’s nonfiction. These astonishing essays cover a wide range of literary topics, including discussions of complex musical forms and Oulipian techniques, to insightful commentaries on the works of Lewis Carroll, Raymond Roussel, Italo Calvino, Joseph McElroy, and Georges Perec. Throughout the collection Mathews examines the relationship between form and literature in a lucid, intimate voice, arguing with intelligence, grace, and humor for the importance of artifice.